


Prism

by Yavemiel



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 01:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11818350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yavemiel/pseuds/Yavemiel
Summary: Jyn’s perspective of her parents changes over the years as her own life experiences change.





	Prism

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Jyn Erso Appreciation Squad on Tumblr (jynappreciationsquad.tumblr.com). Massive thanks to wonderstrevor who made a gorgeous gifset to go with the fic there.

When Jyn is very small, Mama is more a collection of sensations than a person: a laugh, a smile, a smell, a feeling. Safe.

As she grows older, she learns what causes those things: Mama laughs when Papa twirls her round in the air, smiles at Jyn when she explains what adventures she and Stormy had been up to, dabs perfume on her wrists that Jyn forever associates with her alone.

With age also comes the knowledge that her Mama isn’t always happy. Visits from Uncle Orson always make her upset (Jyn can’t figure out why, she loves Uncle Orson with his funny stories and the toys he always brings) and sometimes she and Papa argue afterwards.

Jyn doesn’t understand any of it until long after the night she is shaken awake by Papa —

_“Come on Stardust, quick and quiet...we’re going on a very important mission.”_

— long after her mother tries to explain it to her —

_“I know you like Uncle Orson, Jynnie, but sometimes he’s not a very nice man, and he works for some very bad people.”_

_“Does that mean Papa is bad?”_

_“‘Why do you ask that?”_

_“He works for Uncle Orson doesn’t he?”_

_“Not anymore, Jynnie.”_

_“So was he a bad man then?”_

_“No he just got caught up in...well, he got confused. Don’t worry, you’ll understand when you’re older. All you need to know is that your Papa is a good man.”_

— but what she does understand is how much happier her parents are on Lah’mu, especially her Mama.

Her Mama starts singing, teaches Jyn songs about the green fields of Takodana, the mountains of Alderaan and the Ampohr trees and blue seas of Scarif —

_“I see the moon and the moon sees me, down through the leaves of the Ampohr tree,_   
_Please let the light that shines on me, shine on the one I love…”_

— and Jyn listens raptly and swears that she will grow up and visit them all.

Mama laughs more and smiles more and hugs Jyn more, cooks terribly and sews worse, and teaches Jyn all manner of things about rocks and dirt and farming, and if Papa sometimes scribbles frantically on scraps of paper which he later burns in their stove with an air of resignation, well, he still seems content. Those are the happiest years of Jyn’s life.

Then Uncle Orson returns and Jyn is betrayed.

She sits in the bunker and rocks and tightens her grasp around Mama’s necklace until she can’t feel her fingers anymore. She doesn’t close her eyes, because she doesn’t want to see Mama’s body — _notdeadnotdeadnotdeadNOTDEADshecan’tbedeadpleasepleaseplease_ — and Krennic’s cruel smile — _notUncleOrsonneveragain_ — and Papa walking away — _comebackpleasecomebackdon’tleavemehere_ — but the visions play out in front of her eyes anyway in the darkness of the bunker.

She can’t understand why Mama went back. She was supposed to go with Jyn, that was the plan, that’s what they’d practiced over and over, her and Mama down in the bunker, sitting quietly and identifying the different rocks.

_I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t unde—_

The hatch opens. Jyn looks up and her new life begins.

Life on Lah’mu in no way prepared Jyn for life with Saw. The Partisans live rough, and there are few smiles and even fewer laughs. Hugs become a thing of Jyn’s past, as does practically all casual physical contact.

Sparring becomes her main source of human touch, and she throws herself into it night and day. She advances in leaps and bounds, quickly outstripping her instructors and earning Saw’s gruff praise, a rarity which she treasures when it comes.

She learns all the things that her parents had tried to shield her from: the Empire and their evil, the terror and havoc that they were wreaking, and, most of all, information about Jyn’s Papa and the weapons he made for them once and is now again, or so Jyn assumes. Her resentment towards her Papa festers. How could he leave with the man who murdered Mama? How dare he make weapons that killed other people?

And so she ignores the echo of his last words —

_“Remember, whatever I do, I do it to protect you…I love you, Stardust.”_

— and fights harder, pushes Saw to take her on missions, establishes herself as one of his fiercest and most loyal fighters.

While her memory of her Papa sours, her memories of her Mama linger brighter, tarnished only by the final betrayal that she cannot bring herself to forgive. Nonetheless, she ends every day with her fist clenched tight around the crystal at her neck, not quite praying, but it’s the time she feels most at peace.

She asks Saw about her Mama once. He has become withdrawn of late, from everyone, but from Jyn especially. They are sat in a bunker, larger than the one Saw rescued her from, but still cramped, especially with a small cadre packed in.

Saw is silent for so long after she asks him —

_“Saw...canyoupleasetellmeaboutMama?”_

— that she thinks he isn’t going to answer, another unanswered question to add to the pile, but eventually he says “Your mother was very brave, and very loyal. She loved you, and your father. She believed in the Force, and she believed in the Cause.”

He looks at her, really looks for the first time in months. “You are so very like her, Jyn.”

They are silent for a while and Jyn jumps when he speaks again.

“I know I have been harsh to you at times” — she shakes her head but he ignores her — “but you are like a daughter to me.”

Jyn thinks of her Papa and says defiantly, “You’re the only father I’ve had that’s counted.”

Saw smiles, though he looks sad, and pats her hand. “In the morning, I must take the cadre and go on ahead. Wait here for me, my child. I will return.”

In the morning, Jyn wakes alone. It takes her three days to admit to herself that he isn’t coming back.

For the next four years, Jyn does her best to feel nothing. She doesn’t think of Papa, walking away from her with Unc...the man in white. She doesn’t think of Saw, saying “I will return.” She doesn’t think of Mama, tying the crystal round her neck and then leaving, leaving, leaving. (She does still fall asleep holding the kyber tight, but it doesn’t bring her the peace it once did)

She doesn’t think and she doesn’t feel. She survives and she works for whoever will pay her enough to eat and keep a blaster on her hip and clothes on her back, and she finds that it’s surprisingly easy to ignore the injustices of the Empire if you’re not looking. (That’s a lie. She always notices, but it’s easier to pretend she doesn’t.)

Eventually though her luck runs out, she works with the wrong person at the wrong time and Liana Hallik ends up in Imperial custody and very quickly on her way to Wobani. She thinks of Mama for the first time in years as she’s forced into the mines, remembers Mama’s clever hands and kind words, explaining different types of rock to a younger version of herself, as the ‘troopers push the prisoners past the point of physical exhaustion towards insanity with their stun prods.

The ‘troopers guard every exit, keep a watchful eye over every group of toiling prisoners. There’s only one escape route left clear, a walkway to a patch of grey sky where you can step off and fall down, down, down to crunch against the bottom of the mineshaft below. The ‘troopers don’t try and stop any prisoner who walks that way. There’s always another one to take their place.

Jyn wonders, sometimes, about that patch of sky, whether it would be better to die looking up than at the hands of her cellmate or maybe an overzealous trooper shoving a stun prod in a bit too long. She walks all the way to the edge once, past the’ troopers and the other workers, the sky calling her, but when she gets there, she looks down and sees the bodies in varying stages of decay, and she can’t quite do it, can’t lie down just yet. She feels very aware of the crystal round her neck as she walks back, pulsing in time with her heartbeat it seems, and somehow it gives her the strength to pick up her tools once more, ignoring the jeers from the other prisoners and the threatening crackle of electricity from the ‘troopers prod.

That night she falls asleep with her fist around the crystal for the first time since she came to Wobani, and wakes to water dropping on her face and the snores of her cellmate, and she curses her own weakness and promises herself that today she’ll die looking up, but she never gets the chance, the Alliance throwing a wrench in her plans. It’s fitting, she thinks later, that her last view of Wobani is a fading patch of grey sky. That had always been her plan.

The Alliance leaders are a shriek of raw sound against her nerves, numbed by so long in Wobani, none more so than Captain Andor. There’s something about him, something Jyn can’t think to name, a fire in his blood that reminds her that her blood ran hot once, but she remembers the pain that comes with the heat, and shies away.

The mention of Papa rocks her to her core, because she isn’t lying, she did think he was dead, and the thought of Saw makes her sick, but the thought of Wobani makes her sicker, a knee jerk response that surprises her. She didn’t realise she had any fight left, but there it is, and so she agrees to give them an introduction.

Jedha is a surprise. She dreams of her parents as they travel and maybe that’s why she’s so on edge as they land, ready to start a fight where normally she would walk away, and talking to the blind monk unsettles her, reminds her of how her mother used to talk of the Force, dragging memories long hidden to the surface, but the Captain, Andor (Cassian), he surprises her the most, his idealism —

_“Rebellions are built on hope.”_

— and his willingness to put himself in harm’s way for her, how he shoots one of the Partisans without a second thought, and it’s been a long time, so long since she had someone to watch her back, and she attributes the heat in her belly to that, allows it to explain why she jumps in front of his droid, and claims them in front of the Partisans, claims her own name as well for the first time in years and it feels better than she can believe to be Jyn Erso again, makes her feel closer to her Mama, and to her Papa, who maybe, maybe hasn’t betrayed her as she thought.

He hasn’t.

His message cuts her wide open, no pretence at apathy left, because she hasn’t lived as he would would want, as Mama would want, allowed her own pain —

_“The pain of that loss is so overwhelming I risk failing even now.”_

— to make her lose sight of the Cause, and as they flee Jedha, crumbling now, brought low by the Empire at last, she grasps her necklace and prays to the Force, to Mama, _please don’t let me be too late._

She makes it on time but somehow is still too late, the story of her life, and as they flee Eadu, she turns on Cassian, the fire in her belly still there, but fueled by rage now and not whatever strange affection she felt before, and she lashes out hard, feeling her blows hit with vicious satisfaction as his mask finally drops and he lashes back. It’s the most honest she’s been with anyone in years.

He’s obviously taken her words to heart, because he vanishes as soon as they land, and so she goes in front of the council, not alone, because Bodhi is there, brave Bodhi, but without Cassian, and that stings more than it should from a man who just tried to kill her father.

They don’t listen, because of course they don’t, Saw was right about them —

_“The Alliance will never be capable of a decisive strike, because they do not have the strength to make the difficult decisions. This is why they have abandoned us, my child: they recognise that we will not hesitate.”_

— but she was wrong about Cassian, he didn’t abandon her. She listens to his speech and her heart grows lighter with every word, and as the men rush past them, she has to tell him, let him know somehow how much it means —

_“I'm not used to people sticking around when things go bad.”_

— and his eyes soften as he leans in close and intimate —

_“Welcome home.”_

— and the crystal around her neck sings.

As if to make up for years of suppression, her memories of Mama and Papa are at the forefront of her mind as they move through the base on Scarif, their faces peering at her around every corner, Mama’s voice in her ear as she makes the leap onto the central tower in the vault, and when Cassian falls, his body crunching on steel beams, she screams his name and for a split second, she thinks about letting go too, thinks about climbing down to him, but the moment passes as she presses her forehead to the cold metal in front of her and she thinks _I understand now Mama. I understand why you went back for him._

Krennic doesn’t recognise her. The shock on his face when she reveals herself —

_“I'm Jyn Erso, daughter of Galen and Lyra. You've lost.”_

— is almost worth the knowledge that she’s going to die at his blaster, the same way that Mama did, except when the shot comes she doesn’t feel it, and she watches in disbelief as he crumples at her feet, feels a smile come to her face unbidden as she looks up to meet Cassian’s eyes, alive, alive, alive.

She lets him pull her away from Krennic, supports him as they make it to the turbolift, watches him as they descend, unable to put her emotions into words, but for once certain that she is understood despite her silence. He says nothing either, but the words are unnecessary, his eyes speaking volumes.

They stumble out of the citadel into the daylight, and she can feel his weight growing heavier at her side, knows that if they don’t find a way off this planet soon that he might not be able…and then she looks up at the same moment as him and sees the light, too bright for the sun, and she understands immediately that there will be no way off the planet for them. Their fight is done, the baton passed, and all that’s left is peace and each other.

They move in silent agreement towards the water’s edge until she can carry his weight no more and they slide to the ground. Jyn spies the Death Star beyond the halo of light and struggles against the impulse to laugh hysterically as she remembers the song her Mama taught her so many years ago —

_“I see the moon and the moon sees me…”_

— before Cassian’s hand on hers distracts her —

_“Your father would be proud of you Jyn.”_

— and she can’t help but think —

_‘He would, but not as proud as my Mama.’_

— but there’s no time to explain, so she smiles at him in gratitude because he’s done what no-one else in her life has done, come back for her again and again, and she wants to give him some of that comfort back, carefully pulling his body against hers as he expends the last of his strength to return her embrace. He presses his face into her neck as she watches the light move towards them unblinking, her Mama’s voice echoing in her head.

_“Over the mountains, down by the sea, that’s where my heart is longing to be,_   
_Please let the light that shines on me, shine on the one I lo—”_

**Fin**

**Author's Note:**

> The song that Jyn and Lyra is singing is a very slightly altered version of "I See The Moon" written by Meredith Wilson and sung by a whole of host of people down through the years! Thanks so much for reading, if you enjoyed it, please hit me up in the comments, or come scream about all things Rogue One with me on tumblr at yavemiel.tumblr.com :) x


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